Share This Story!

Bravo is getting a 'Divorce'

For its first scripted series, Bravo is getting a Divorce. Coming to Bravo Dec. 2, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce stars Lisa Edelstein as a popular self-help/family life guru who shocks the world by dumping her

BEVERLY HILLS — For its first scripted series, Bravo is getting a Divorce.

Coming to Bravo Dec. 2, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce stars Lisa Edelstein as a popular self-help/family life guru who shocks the world by dumping her husband (Paul Adelstein). The series is adapted from the books by Vicki Iovine, who is a producer, along with TV veteran Marti Noxon. Janeane Garofalo and Beau Garrett costar.

If Divorce seems like an odd shift for Noxon, who is best known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it turns out it's actually closer to her heart than she might like. "Today, I paid my last alimony payment. That felt like some kind of a good sign."

The show, though, isn't autobiographical, and isn't just about divorce. "This show felt like so much more than that for me…I had wanted to write for a long time about sexual politics."

One of those political issues revolves around Adelstein's husband character, a stay-at-home dad demanding alimony. "A lot of things that you think are the dynamic in that family…are not what turns out to be so," says Adelstein.

This is a story of a marriage falling apart, and after the first day of shooting, Adelstein says, "I felt like, oh, I could totally be divorced from this woman."

Edelstein agrees that there was an instant familial feel to their scenes. "I don't know why. Maybe because it's Edelstein/Adelstein. We felt like family from the same shtetl."

It also, she says, felt real — perhaps because moments like Edelstein;s Abby saying her ex-husband's name during sex came straight from Noxon's life. "It's grounded in reality as much as it can be in television," says Edelstein. "The humor comes out of life stories, rather than jokes."

Noxon originally created the show for Showtime, but she's thrilled that it now will become Bravo's first scripted show. When she worked on Mad Men at AMC, she says, "I was part of the experience of being on the train that changed a whole network, so this was an incredible opportunity."